"To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories— entering into their feelings, validating their experiences— is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness."

William Deresiewicz, from A Jane Austen Education